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Originally Posted by glatt
Great story! Where did you hear it? Is it European origin? Jewish? Or did it come from some other culture and the Jews just made it their own by turning the wise men into rabbis? What's it have to do with arrowheads though?
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Sinew? Not much, sinew with you?
So how did the natives harvest sinew?
When you butcher an animal you cut the tendon and put it aside. Awesome video of some dishy inuit gals harvesting sinew from an elk (not for people who don’t like to look at dishy inuit gals or meat being butchered
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmD49...-4UN6ztUUBIyQw
Where's the sinew?
Sinew connects muscle to bone. It’s another word for Tendon, I guess sort of like how pig becomes pork, tendon becomes sinew. I made that last part up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendon
In a chicken or turkey, you get some muscles that have a tendon attached where the muscle comes to a point. It that tendon the sinew?
Yes, the other end of the sinew is at the bone.
How do you get it into those thin strips?
After the sinew dries you pound the living hell out of it and it flattens into a bundle of fibers with a thin sheath around them. You remove the sheath.
Do you remove it when raw and try to pull the fibers apart?
No, you dry the thing first. I dried some beef tendons in a food dryer on low for a few days.
Do you cook it first?
No. Cooking the sinew turns it into glue. I keep the small scraps and whatnot and simmer them in water and they make glue. Really, really strong glue. A method for frosting glass was to paint a piece of glass with gelatin (animal glue) and lay a piece of canvas in the wet glue. After it dried they would rip the canvas off the glass plate and it would take the glass with it. (Sort of like waxing legs, I guess)
Is there a particular place on the animal where you get the sinew?
The two best places for tendon are the hind legs, for thick but short tendons, (I guess they would be analogous to our Achilles tendons, Nirvana could probably tell us their name) and the other is the back staps or what would be the Loin. These are very long but very thin. Better suited to bowstrings and backing bows.
How much sinew is on an animal? Enough for a hundred arrows, or is it like you can make one or two arrows with one animal?
How much usable sinew? Pretty much just the back legs and the backstraps are usable but will yield a lot of sinew. Thousands of arrows. The backstraps? I’m guessing maybe two bowstrings, but I could be way off. Small intestine is also used as a bowstring. I used about 4 beef tendons (leg) to make sinew backing for 2 bows, still have some left over.
I see this arrow is made of bamboo, or some similar grass or reed type of plant. Is that just a modern guess at how you can make arrows, or is it based on archeological evidence?
Archeological evidence. It is actually not bamboo, but Phragmites, the common reed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phragmites
I'd guess that each tribe of indians had its own local natural resources that it used.
Arrow shafting is made from many kinds of plants, Red Osier Dogwood, Arrow Wood Viburnum, Wild Rose (multiflora), reeds, cedar, juniper, pine, cane, reed, bamboo, pretty much anything, light, strong and fairly straight.
Fletching has been made with nearly every kind of feather. Wild turkey wing feathers are one of the most common. The type of feather varies depending on the use of the arrow. (the game being hunted)
There's no flint or obsidian in Arlington, but indians lived and hunted here. What did they use for their arrows? A lot of stones were used including novaculite (the stuff Arkansas whetstones are made from) coprolite (dinosaur poop-who knew?) basalt, pertrified wood, petrified bone, chalcedony, or any cryptocrystalline quartz.
One likely scenario for stone tool production would be for a group to travel to a quarry, spend time there making blanks (called bi-faces) that they would then carry home to finish as needed, thus reducing the weight they had to carry substantially. These could be traded etc. Remember, these folks were up and down the east coast all the time. Wasn’t it the Iroquois who ran up and down the eastern seaboard?